Month: March 2005
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What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (Maureen Dowd edition)
In a Washington Post column last week, Michael Kinsley weighed in on Maureen Dowd’s career: When the New York Times anointed Maureen Dowd as a columnist nine years ago, I gave her some terrible advice. I said, “You’ve got to write boy stuff. The future of NATO, campaign spending reform. Throw weights. Otherwise, they won’t
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The future of marketing: Big Mac goes hiphop
Ben Fritz (my friend, formerly of Spinsanity) has some breaking news on his blog from the strange world of “integrated brand marketing”: MCDONALD’S BUYING WAY INTO HIP-HOP SONG LYRICS March 23, 2005 LOS ANGELES — McDonald’s Corp. has hired entertainment marketing firm Maven Strategies to help the fast-food giant encourage hip-hop artists to integrate the
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AP bungles McCain quote
Here’s a great example of how the media fails to adequately fact-check deceptive statements. Today, John McCain made a misleading claim about Social Security that the AP reported as follows: McCain took a jab at AARP, the lobby for older citizens, which has been buying television and newspaper advertisements in cities Bush is visiting to
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Dumb Edwards statistic on poverty
John Edwards sent an email (PDF) to supporters today that made this claim: While poverty is all around us, the first step in eradicating it is to shine a bright light on it. Here’s what we know: 36 million Americans live in poverty today, which is 13 million more than 30 years ago. However, if you
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More bad Factcheck.org criticism of AARP
FactCheck.org has published another terrible article about AARP and Social Security. (For details on the last one, see my previous post.) This time, Factcheck focuses on metaphors used by the AARP in a recent ad. The obvious problem, however, is that metaphors are deeply subjective. There are no facts to check – the whole issue
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Medical community comes down on Frist
According to the LA Times, Bill Frist’s home video-based “diagnosis” of Terry Schiavo has drawn a rebuke from medical experts: Frist’s comments raised eyebrows in the medical community. Although there are no official rules against the practice, ethicists said, it is generally considered unprofessional for a doctor to make or question a diagnosis on the
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Bill Thomas misleads on Social Security
From Tuesday’s Washington Post, here’s Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA): “The one thing people should not be concerned about is that in creating personal accounts you are going to exercise any significant risk,” Thomas said at a town hall meeting at California State University at Bakersfield. “It will be structured in a way that you can
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Democracy for America tries to silence USA Next
Back at Spinsanity, I wrote a lot about the way Republicans used the phrase “political hate speech” to try to silence criticism of President Bush by equating it with racism (here and especially here). This is one of the many PR-influenced tactics that politicians and pundits now use to try to achieve a blatantly undemocratic
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FAIR hypes shaky estimate of Iraqi casualties
The political abuse of statistics continues. In an action alert sent to its email list today, the liberals at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting claim that Iraqi civilian casualty estimates of 16,500-20,000 offered by the network newscasts, including NBC’s Brian Williams, were too low: NBC’s Williams seemed to be referring to an estimate of Iraqi
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Bill Frist: Crank, MD
I’ve been offline and/or traveling for most of the weekend, so I haven’t weighed in on the shameless exploitation of the Schaivo case by Congressional Republicans. But to make an obvious point, it is indeed shameless. Maybe the most ridiculous aspect of the whole charade has been people pretending to diagnose Schiavo from afar. Here’s